


Step Back

by NukeLassic



Category: The Property of Hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 21:40:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20414737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NukeLassic/pseuds/NukeLassic
Summary: "Do not step backwards." The hare had told her. After a lingering second, "You will, of course. But..." She wished he'd told her what it would cost to do so, and why it was impossible to choose not to.





	Step Back

Time is a single, flowing stream. A current of energy that flows forward in gentle rushes and graceful curves. The surface of it churns the wisps of energy, compelling everything caught in it forward. Time flows, and those within its currents flow with it.

But, one does not have to.

The currents can be fought, the direction stalled, the flow dammed. Even those under the eternal drive forward can stall their progress, or unmoor themselves from the flow. Not forever, but for moments. Those who swim through the surge of time may not find themselves entirely the same, for the process of breaking free from time takes its own tolls, and comes with its own challenges.

Further, time is linear. No matter how one tries to influence the stream that comes before it, it will still reform back to a familiar shape. One can flow within time, but one cannot alter it entirely. No more than one could dig a new river with one’s hands. To do so would unmake the future where the traveler had departed it, and the very elements that got them there would dash them against the edges as they displaced themselves from the future itself. Their bodies, their selves, their entirety, little more than an echo of those who meddled too heavily in time, left in fragments upon the rocks that line the flow.

Those who dabble in the past must do so carefully.

The flow of time is not absolute, though, its course faintly mutable. Gentle suggestions, careful nudges, and considered advice can lead to corrections. Enough, spaced carefully, delivered perfectly, can unmake the more violent excesses of the current, and usher in a slight shift in the futures ahead.

She knew all of this already, and surveyed the barren fields one last time. Whatever had once been here was here no longer. Emptiness had swallowed the very dirt on which she stood, looked at the figures of the fallen laying broken among the blanched weeds and skeletons of the trees.

There were no more smiles. Time had flowed forward, and its surging rapids and propelled everything there, to this sunken moment. A body in a crisp suit lay beneath her feet, cane splintered across the ground. The tongue of her green boots spilled out from somewhere within his jacket, a hidden compartment that must’ve gotten unstitched in the scuffle.

The only echo of life raked into the sky, golden vines painting slashes of color across the blanched dirt, where translucent purple flowers had come apart, scattering their petals in irregular patterns.

Others were nearly unrecognizable in the distance. Perhaps a leg, an arm, or an eye empty of its socket. Just parts, nothing whole, nothing real. Tears welled in her eyes, dilated of all color, until only the whites and the deep blacks of her pupils remained. The smallest hint of a ring sat just outside of the inky blackness, and when she blinked, it seemed to disappear, swallowed by the void that had consumed her heart..

“Only the extremely clever and the exceedingly mad meddle with the flow of time,” the television had once told her, “and from most vantages, there’s no difference between them.” Tears fell, and she made up her mind. She would have to be exceedingly mad.

To step from the flow of time was as much all sensations as none of them. As if stepping into a room, utterly devoid of sound, while the sound of the blood flowing through the ears sounds like emphatic fury. As if dunking one’s head into frozen water at the same time as stepping into an oven. Pinpoints of cold bathed in a dry, ruinous fire. Colors of every imaginable sort meet with colors unimagined, and together they assault the senses in a furious, cacaphonous strobe. The sudden absence of time is unbearable, and those who drag themselves along the shores quickly learn to swim backwards instead of climbing out.

Only the exceedingly mad climb out more than once.

To return to the flow of time meant spilling back into a current in motion. The fury of that transition was never something one ventured into lightly. “The wise,” he once said of time’s travelers, “form for themselves new bodies as they fight the currents. Too large, and they find themselves buffeted by a current too strong to fight. Too small, and they cannot swim backwards.” As she found herself falling back into the flow of reality, her form had shifted. No longer a gangly, no longer so innocent. She had grown insectile wings, as fragile as her traumas have made her, but able to rejoin the current smoothly. A concession, she realized, and one she would have to live with.

The sky was blue, gentle waves of blue lapped at the green shores. Back before the lake had boiled. Before the land had baked. Before she had been there once and again. Back when she’d only been there the first and third. She hovered gently toward the ground, wings flapping gingerly to slow her descent.

What horrors she had and would face, she could not say. To do so would be to rend her Stuff from her body, and dash herself and her barest hopes at the same time. Instead, she lit upon a plant, and looked at herself musing quietly over a Lie. He was laid against a tree, asleep. She had drawn glasses on his monitor, a thought that at once made her smile and tore holes in her heart.

She looked at herself—small, innocent, and unaware—too small for all of this. It had broken her, it _will_ break her. But, perhaps she could grant herself a small mercy. Small enough to nudge the scales, to drive her future into something better.

Something with less death.

“You do not trust him?” She asked.

The Younger shook her head.

“That is wise. Good.” She began, choosing her words carefully. “You are a wise hero.”

She peered at the Older. “So am I really a hero?” 

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“You came here.” She was always a Hero, here. And never anything else.

“...With him.” She hedged.

“And why was that?”

The Younger pondered a moment, the spark of something spoke to her. “Because he needed a hero!”

Too long in the past. She felt the flow of time against her body. Both here, and There, where she was-will be, and wasn’t-has never been. Too many changes. She felt the pull tearing her away, and she fought the feeling. “I must go. But I shall see you again, Hero. Be wise.” She took to the skies. “Be wise.”

The past has a way of building, gathering time in a terrible concentration. If one lingers, one’s very presence ravages the world around them. The gathered time coalesces, all at once, and sunders anything too close. As she drifted into the sky, time else unmade her perch, and neither the Younger nor the Older noticed.

Time’s eternal surges were a comfort. Familiar, nostalgic. Without them, the din was destructive. To hold an image of oneself, to hold that form without losing the previous, was a tall order in the cacophony of silence. She held tightly to her new form, unable to face the crushing emptiness, scrapes, traumas, and tears of the body that she’d left in the future.

The Idea lay, defeated, on the grass. She was also knelt down next to it. She remembered this, how betrayed she’d felt. How horrible this monster was to have done this to her, to have made her do this. How perfect, wonderfully awful, it must have been to have been so mistreated and also convinced.

She paused at this moment, thinking carefully about her words. “I asked you to be wise.”

“I know…” She replied, in a mumble.

“You remember, that is different.” She thought for a moment. Her future had come down to a few pivotal decisions. To be a hero was to make those decisions, even for him if need be. She knew that was a lesson she could not fail to learn. “But you are forgetting. This is not his journey.” She looked at the recessed, grayed creature beneath her legs. “These are not _his_ decisions.”

The Younger lingered for a moment longer, got up, and scurried off after his calls. The Older sat, and stared for a moment. Would that she could be carried away with this Idea now. She sighed, and fluttered back into the skies, above and out of time.

In her future, she saw him. The Very Worst. A force of destruction unlike any had ever known. None living at his arrival had survived to see his passing. Everything left in that terrible wake had left in pieces. Mere fragments. A single, dark eye that consumed all life in its fury. Even his own. Only she’d survived.

As she left the currents once again, she felt it all. Outside of time, the mind waned, to travel outside was to lose parts of oneself. No mind could survive the ruinous silence, the power of every bit of nothing. She felt all the emotions she’d been hiding from, every time she left the flow. And, every time, left more of herself out on the shore. When she rejoined the current, only the strongest emotions remained. All filtered through so much impassioned fury, only that single thought had been seared into her vision. A single, horrifying eye, as blanched as its final battlefield, reaching to end the conflict and all involved. The Very Worst, he’d warned her from the very beginning.

She hadn’t believed him when he’d said it, but she should have. Maybe she could make her.

They stood at the threshold of the forest. The sea surged above them, and she descended in among the shadows. A moment of quiet darkness that felt balming after the tumult of nothingness that assaulted her senses out of time.

She landed on the Younger’s back, and held onto an image. A single eye, white in its bounds, but bathed in furious color. The Very Worst. That image haunted her memory even now, a fury unbound by civility, unchecked in power, and incapable of anything but ruination.

It would have to be enough.

It wasn’t. The Younger spoke, evoking the names of the bodies on the ground. The corpses that haunted her future. “_They_ must trust you.” A scattered field of parts. Broken pieces of a broken story. “So don’t let them down, okay?”

The Older fluttered away, furious, and plunged once again out of time.


End file.
